Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Patch Day Distractions

I don't know about you, gentle reader, but I for one never get anything done after a big patch. There's always a zillion things to do that aren't really playing the game at all. Sometimes its just futzing with addons that eats up my time, in other cases its a respec. Patch 1.2 was the mailbox game edition of patch day distractions. I hope for your sake that all your dye producing junk was in your bag or bank, but if like me you use the mail as an ancillary bank (running across IC is nice and all, but inconvenient to my on-the-go-murdering-people lifestyle). Based on the gaggle aroun the mailbox in the IC quad, I'm guessing my strategy is pretty common. Anyway, mail service was hella slow. So slow that I often just clicked an attachment a couple of times and then opened the next one, hoping for the best.

Compounding the problem was the untimely demise of zMailMod, as shown here:

Now some folks in the new (and totally obnoxious) IC region chat were saying that zmailmod still worked, albeit slowly. I can't say, but it didn't strike me as at all responsive.

So yeah mail was hosed. On the other hand the new multi-attachment thing worked perfectly and more quickly than zmail ever did.

Back to that IC region chat. Such a terrible waste of time. Useful, I imagine for buying and selling and all, but oh so annoying. There was actually a giant political argument going on. MMOs and politics are not friends, people. Half of the people trolling IC chat aren't old enough to vote, and the other half didn't vote.

Seriously, just say no.

So as everyone no doubt knows deprecated crafting reagents got the ol' dye job. 10 veggies or 20 animal bits convert into chaos black dye. By the way, what a nice touch. Black dye is very desirable (for destruction anyway) but not at all attainable before this little treat. I will treasure and hoard my dyes until I know they'll go to good use.

But about the conversion process. I have to say that I admire mythic's handling of this. By which I mean, they didn't just whisk it all away. There's a little color text and a conversion action. It made the whole thing kind of fun.

Items that were reclassed or converted to another item also had a "touched by the winds of chaos" bit that I thought was pretty nice. In some cases, you could even use the old item instead of converting it, I saw that setup on some apoth reagents that got cultivation conversions.

Vials, at least high end ones, got a special conversion description that caused me some alarm:

But no worries, it converted to a similar level epic quality vial. I thought i was going to have a pocket full of broken glass for a minute.

Finally a /bonk to myself for not having a bit of faith in mythic. If you've been in Troll Country recently you've probably gotten some "Torn" equipment. Shoulderplates, weaponry, robes all of it only said "this isn't convertable to something usable by your class." I knew, I knew that this was just a bug, and yet ... you couldn't disenchant, or vendor, so when my bags filled up a trashed these, a lot of them, probably a dozen. I had exactly two left, stored in an alt's bank. Lo and Behold come 1.2, they're fixed:

Yeah, I probably shouldv'e destroyed those worn garments in my bag before i killed all that nice and valuable gear. Oh well. Live and learn.